The Whiteboard: The Charlotte Hornets are lacking vision
By Ti Windisch
The Charlotte Hornets aren’t quite tanking, but they aren’t making many win-now moves either.
The Charlotte Hornets are bad. Charlotte just wrapped up a second consecutive 36-win season, ending the Steve Clifford era and doubling the Hornets’ now two-year playoff drought. Charlotte would be pretty hopeless without star point guard Kemba Walker, who swears he wants to remain a Hornet.
Despite his proclamations, it’s pretty obvious why Kemba keeps ending up in trade rumors: Bad teams typically don’t hold onto their stars. Even teams that aren’t taking tanking to an extreme, like the Philadelphia 76ers did, typically see the vision of trying to get some value for a player instead of losing them eventually in free agency.
The Hornets don’t seem inclined to deal Kemba anytime soon, though. That sort of makes sense — the Hornets are not one of the top two basketball teams in North Carolina when it comes to popularity, and fears of losing whatever relevance Charlotte has left might not be unfounded. Thus it would make sense for the Hornets to try and acquire some help for Kemba.
That hasn’t really happened either. Charlotte brought in Miles Bridges and Tony Parker as their biggest offseason acquisitions. Bridges is 20-years-old, meaning his best basketball is still years off. Parker is 36, meaning his best basketball is years back.
Those two, plus Malik Monk probably getting better in his second season, are not much of a bump. While the Cleveland Cavaliers are obviously going to be much, much worse this season, the rest of the Eastern Conference teams that finished around Charlotte last year are all still trying to win.
The Hornets got 80 games out of Kemba last season and won 36 games all year. They’ll need him to be healthy yet again, and have to hope for a lot of internal development and/or some team like the Washington Wizards implodes (which is certainly possible). Maybe it works out and they sneak into the eighth seed.
Still, Charlotte’s path to actual NBA relevance probably isn’t going to include Kemba based on the lack of talent and the wasted money on the Hornets cap sheet. If they can’t find other good players to put around their All-Star, they might want to deal him for some more future assets.
Next: Jayson Tatum and the improvement of young passers
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